Skip to main content

Completing Father Bede's life



I finished Shirley du Boulay's moving biography of Dom Bede Griffiths over lunch sitting on a quiet side street. A gentle breeze dispelling midday heat.

The last years of his life were extraordinary culminating in a series of strokes that were once physiological events and accompanied by trans formative experience that brought him to a new wholeness: a marriage of rational mind infused with spiritual intuition and permeated by a deeper than ever capacity to love. Inward experience was outwardly visible to all who knew him and, paradoxically, as Shirley notes, this deeper holiness allowed him to be more human, even the irritating quirks and twists of his nature, including his anger, found their appropriate place in the life of his last years.

It awakened in me old yearnings for the contemplative life and I wandered up from my table into the streets of Sansepolcro and into the arms of the awaiting cathedral. This is dedicated to St John the Evangelist that most mystical of the four gospel writers, two of whose key texts resonated with Bede at the end. Jesus' prayer to the Father that we all be one as he and the Father are one and that love of God and of neighbour are the summation of the good news. Indeed I would add John's deep commitment to friendship that Bede had in abundance.

And in serendipitous irony on the cloister wall of the cathedral is a fifteenth century wall painting depicting scenes from the life of St Benedict, whose order Bede had embraced.

I sat awhile in the dark peacefulness of the church saying the prayer of the heart and giving thanks for Bede's life - both as told by Shirley and in our lengthy correspondence and singular meeting. The descriptions of his presence in those last years was so resonant with how I found him.

I even 'lit' a candle - one of those electric plug in ones that disfigure Italian Catholic Churches of which both he and I heartily disapprove but forgive!


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev